November 2016

Centrify, the leader in securing enterprise identities against cyberthreats, announced today that TMC, a global, integrated media company, has named Centrify Identity Service (CIS) as a 2016 Cloud Computing Security Excellence Award winner in the category of Cloud Security.

The Cloud Computing Security Excellence Award, presented by Cloud Computing magazine, recognizes companies that have most effectively leveraged cloud computing in their efforts to bring new, differentiated offerings to market.

What is Scalability? The question is of what is scalability is often asked. Scalability can handle growth of a Cloud database network by embracing storage and promoting power of a virtual environment. multiple computers hosting information join together so more information and data can be added creating a bigger and faster network that will serve societies needs.

Cloud computing is considered scalable with economic growth. As the economy grows relying on data being stored a cloud has the ability to increase storage capacity. A special algorithm is used to determine the needs of a user and will scale the storage environment accordingly. The design and settings of the cloud must be configured properly so the algorithm is able to detect the changes made by the user approximating the amount of bandwidth that is needed to suite the needs of the user...

Many organizations are in the midst of digital business development and transformation, yet only 58 percent were using cloud services by the end of 2015. Even 10 years after the introduction of public cloud computing services, and five-plus years of private cloud services, confusion remains over where and how to exploit these services. While cloud computing is a foundation for digital business, Gartner estimates that less than one-third of enterprises have a documented cloud strategy.

Cloud computing will become the dominant design style for new applications and for refactoring a large number of existing applications over the next 10-plus years. A cloud strategy clearly defines the business outcomes you seek, and how you are going to get there. Having a cloud strategy will enable you to apply its tenets quickly with fewer delays, thus speeding the arrival of your ultimate business outcomes...

Printing virtualization innovator UniPrint.net Corp announced today a comprehensive case study of its 8 year history within The Welsh Government, which can be viewed in its entirety here. Beginning in 2008, Welsh Government deployed UniPrint.net’s Universal Printer Driver solution to eliminate the Citrix printing issues of this sprawling governing body.

Established in 1999, The Welsh Government (Llywodraeth Cymru) is the executive of the National Assembly for Wales. Spanning across Wales from Cardiff in the south to Llandudno Junction in the north, The Welsh Government has 44 offices, including 7 main offices, and approximately 6,000 users within their Citrix network.

CloudHealth Technologies, the leader in cloud service management, today announced expanded capabilities that enable customers to optimize their infrastructure through integrated performance data and rightsizing recommendations for increased levels of efficiency.

Organizations must have a clear view into cloud usage and performance if they wish to maximize resources and ensure optimal spend. However, the proliferation of multi-cloud and hybrid environments is making the process more complex. A report from Dimensional Research found that 77 percent of companies are planning to implement a multi-cloud strategy in the near term. Adding more instances across platforms, and factoring in the inherently dynamic nature of the cloud, has made it more challenging for organizations to track, manage and optimize their cloud environments.

Domo today announced a series of new free enterprise offerings that leverage Domo's Business Cloud to ease the pain that data analysts experience when trying to move from data discovery to sharing their key insights more broadly across their organizations.

"Data analysts and IT professionals consistently tell us that data discovery tools like Tableau are great tools for data drilling -- but when they need to share insights with executives across the organization, or work with large data sets, their experience quickly descends into what they refer to as 'Tableau Hell'," said Josh James, founder and CEO, Domo. "Everyone is thirsty for data yet today's desktop analysis and on-premise tools are not built for scale and cause more frustration for data professionals who are forced to toggle between multiple tools to find insights and then distribute them into the hands of business decision makers."

This is its third paper on the open cloud and adds many new projects and technology categories that have gained importance in the past year. The report covers well-known projects like Cloud Foundry, CloudStack, Docker, KVM and OpenStack, and up-and-comers such as Ansible, Hygieia, Prometheus and Rancher.

The purpose of this guide is to help companies stay informed about the latest open source cloud technologies and trends. It takes a detailed look into cloud infrastructure, including projects in the areas of IaaS, PaaS, virtualization, containers, cloud operating systems, management and automation, unikernels, DevOps, configuration management, logging and monitoring, software-defined networking (SDN), software-defined storage and networking for containers.

Virtuozzo, a leading virtualization software provider, today announced the appointment of George Karidis as its chief executive officer. Mr. Karidis is a 20+ year veteran of the software industry. He has been a driving force in helping service providers and enterprises harness new cloud infrastructure models to fuel business growth and innovation. At Virtuozzo, Mr. Karidis will focus on leading aggressive company growth and expansion by innovating with new technology, driving new use cases for both service providers and enterprises, and leveraging new channels to market. Today, Virtuozzo offers a complete portfolio of open source and commercial virtualization products, including production-ready containers, an optimized KVM hypervisor, and software-defined storage.

Over the course of his career, Mr. Karidis has established a proven track record of success in leading high-growth businesses. Mr. Karidis served as chief strategy officer and chief operating officer at cloud infrastructure platform provider SoftLayer Technologies, which was acquired by IBM in 2013 for $2 billion. Mr. Karidis played an integral role in building SoftLayer into the largest privately held cloud infrastructure services provider at the time with revenues approaching $400 million. Most recently, Mr. Karidis held the position of president, Cloud Technology Services, at CompuCom, an IT managed services and infrastructure solutions provider. He also held roles at Devonshire Investors, a private equity firm, as well as industry analyst firm The Yankee Group.

With the emergence of cloud computing, companies are still grappling with a dilemma, as to whether a cloud infrastructure would suit their company’s operations at all. However, for those that have moved to the space of using cloud, have found multiple benefits of hybrid cloud computing, which combines the attributes of an on-premise cloud infrastructure, with that of a public cloud. With flexibilities in many aspects of the design, companies can choose among many designs or varieties of hybrid cloud computing, which can further be tailored to their needs.

Empowering IT service providers and MSPs to capitalize on the move to a cloud-first, mobile-ready world, itopia today introduced its Cielo app, the IT and telecom industry's first native mobile application for cloud workspace management. Compatible with both Android and iOS devices, the app empowers channel partners to provide customers with on-the-go management and technical support from virtually anywhere at any time.

Available now at no additional charge to itopia partners, the Cielo app simplifies and streamlines the support cycle for IT service providers and MSPs while dramatically improving the user and customer experiences. The new app is also proven to help technicians make better use of their time and manage support costs by reducing -- and in many cases eliminating -- the need for onsite trouble-shooting resources.

This week Tintri announced that it has been named a Visionary in Gartner Inc.'s 2016 Magic Quadrant for General-Purpose Disk Arrays. This is the third straight year that Tintri has received this distinction. Gartner placed Tintri in the Visionaries Quadrant for completeness of vision and ability to execute.

This year, it was Tintri's VMstore T800 Hybrid-Flash series that was evaluated. In its final 2016 report, Gartner notes, "Tight budgets and skills shortages have caused vendors and users to focus on technologies and features that lower acquisition and ownership costs while improving performance and throughput. This has resulted in thin-provisioning, auto-tiering, hybrid configurations (Flash and HDDs) and near-autonomic operation becoming ubiquitous general-purpose disk arrays. It is also driving the deployment of SSAs into I/O-intensive environments and creating opportunities for emerging storage companies that can refactor infrastructure designs to obtain incremental improvements in performance, economics and staff productivity."

Golem wants to provide what it calls the “Airbnb for computers,” a first-of-its-kind decentralized market for shared computing power. The company hopes the public will find its goals appealing, as it will open a crowdsale for the Golem Network Token (GNT) on November 11, 2016.

This decentralized, Ethereum-based service, once up and running, will reportedly allow people to rent out unused computing power in exchange for cryptocurrency. On the other end of the service, costs for resource-intensive processes will decline, according to Golem, making tasks such as CGI rendering, scientific calculation and machine learning more efficient and accessible...

Greetings from Washington, D.C.! As I prepared for tomorrow’s 2016 OPEN MINDS Technology & Informatics Institute, I came across some stats in a technology survey OPEN MINDS conducted in 2001. It was a trip down memory lane. Wikipedia launched online. Microsoft released the Xbox. The use of wireless local area networking (LANs) exploded. Apple released the iPod. AOL topped 35 million members. Those were the tech developments everyone was talking about. Where were health and human service provider organizations in 2001?

32% of organizations reported that all of their employees had access to the internet

In today's unveiling of the sixth annual Cisco Global Cloud Index (2015-2020), cloud traffic is expected to rise 3.7-fold, up from 3.9 zettabytes (ZB) per year in 2015 to 14.1 ZB per year by 2020. This rapid growth of cloud traffic is attributed to increased migration to cloud architectures due to their ability to scale quickly and efficiently support more workloads than traditional data centers.

With greater data center virtualization, cloud operators are also able to achieve greater operational efficiencies while flexibly delivering a growing variety of services to businesses and consumers with optimal performance. To better understand data center growth, new analysis on application workloads was developed for this year's report. The following business and consumer projections were revealed:

CloudJumper, a Workspace as a Service (WaaS) platform innovator for agile business IT, today announced coverage in a new Workspace as a Service vendor landscape report by MarketsandMarkets Research. The 2016 Vendor Comparison on Workspace as a Service providers offers an analysis of the top vendors in the category, including CloudJumper, Amazon Web Services, Citrix Systems, IndependenceIT, Microsoft Corporation (Azure), and VMware.

The MarketsandMarkets report is based on the research firm's DIVE methodology based on a comprehensive study of the major players offering workspace software and/or services to channel partners and/or independent software vendors. MSPs, ISVs, agents, and other IT service providers are increasingly turning to WaaS to facilitate the easy deployment of digital workplaces at client locations. WaaS is a combined set of pre-integrated services to enable smooth deployment of digital workspaces at client locations. The key vendors in this WaaS market report were shortlisted based on their service capabilities, technology innovations, industry coverage, viability, and breadth of services offered.

The shortage of tech professionals has been a hot issue in the Nashville business community for years now. Running a technology consulting firm myself, I can attest that the challenge to find, hire and retain top tech talent is the No. 1 barrier to growth. The problem is pretty simple: a matter of supply and demand.

Since most every organization is dependent on technology in some respect, the demand curve for tech know-how is on a steep, never-ending climb. So far, the supply side has simply been unable to keep up. Despite increased training opportunities for anyone seeking a career as network engineer or software developer, nationally we are still coming up short of candidates to fill the thousands of job openings...

You don’t need Sherlock Holmes to tell you that cloud computing is on the rise, and that cloud traffic keeps going up. However, it is enlightening to see the degree by which it is increasing, which is, in essence, about to quadruple in the next few years. By that time, 92% percent of workloads will be processed by cloud data centers; versus only eight percent being processed by traditional data centers.

Cisco, which does a decent job of measuring such things, just released estimates that shows cloud traffic likely to rise 3.7-fold by 2020, increasing 3.9 zettabytes (ZB) per year in 2015 (the latest full year data for which data is available) to 14.1 ZB per year by 2020. The big data and associated Internet of Things are a big part of this growth, the study’s authors state...

Nimbix, a leading HPC cloud platform provider today announced the immediate availability of the Xilinx SDAccel development environment for on-demand development, testing, and deployment of FPGA-accelerated workflows in the Nimbix Cloud, powered by JARVICE. The SDAccel development environment combines the industry's first architecturally optimizing compiler supporting any combination of OpenCL, C, and C++ kernels, along with libraries, development boards and industry standard development and run‐time experience for FPGAs.

The new offering will dramatically lower the barrier to leveraging the high performance, energy efficient power of FPGAs to accelerate high end computational workflows across all industries. Developers can now run these tools in the cloud and then test and deploy on the latest Xilinx-accelerated hardware with no upfront investment or equipment purchases.